Another cool nod. ‘I’m afraid he isn’t here today.’
‘We’ll have to save him for later.’
Nod.
‘We have to trace Reidun Rosendal’s last known movements. Therefore it would help me to have a register of customers or a list of clients she visited.’
She straightened her blouse. Stood up. Went over to a machine. Soon a printer was rustling. She tore off the print-out and gave it to him.
The police officer took his leave.
Downstairs, the receptionist was nowhere to be seen. Lisa had said this Kristin Sommerstedt knew the dead girl. Frank glanced at his watch and decided to leave talking to Reidun’s friend until later.
So he went out, opened the car door and turned to look at the building he had left. Glass upon glass. Transparent in places. As shiny and impenetrable as metal in others. To hell with them, he thought, getting in the car. What a bunch!
13
The police station door had just shut behind him when he pulled up and turned. Too late. He had been seen. The face of the woman from the temping agency had already lit up. Her stout body undulated towards him.
‘Ha, ha. Hi, Frank!’
A bowl of jelly fleeing a children’s party, he thought and braced himself. Again he was amazed by this combination of large torso and tiny head. Mauve punky hair up top and slender stiletto heels down below. She waved. Black leggings at bursting point over the stomach. Her whole body pitched and rolled.
‘I’ve been fussing around here for hours on end, worse than a broody hen!’
Between his eyes, he felt his patience being tested.
‘And there you are! Just as I’ve forgotten what it was I wanted to ask you!’
She burst into loud laughter, grabbed his arm and pulled him towards the stairs while stealing furtive glances around her. He tried to free himself but without success. Yawing flesh rubbed against his shoulders and hips.
‘It’s about that letter you asked me to write to the police officer in the provinces!’
She thrust a few papers into his face, obscuring his view of the staircase. Someone was coming down and Frank had to squeeze sideways and restrain her on the step below him.
‘Ooh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Let’s get physical!’
He continued and tried to put some distance between them. But she followed him up the stairs and down the corridor. Panting two paces behind him. Waving the paper in front of her and speaking while pointing to a word that was misspelt. He grabbed the door handle of his office and turned. ‘Absolutely fine,’ he bowed. ‘Write it your way, no problem.’
The plate of jelly slopped to a standstill. Hands on her hips. ‘Do you know what your boss said to me?’
She nodded towards the office door behind his back.
Whatever he said, it can’t have been bad enough, Frank thought, and let her steam ahead, glance to both sides, lean back and demonstratively button her mouth as two uniformed officers passed. ‘He told me to go to…’
She paused for two seconds. ‘Hell,’ she mouthed. Peering conspiratorially to both sides again.
‘I didn’t answer,’ she assured him. ‘But he’ll eat his words, mark you me!’
Frank, thinking the suggestion was not a bad one, blinked with heavy eyelids. ‘I’m sure you misheard,’ he said diplomatically.
‘Not me, no. But I know why he’s like that!’
Frank could feel his curiosity aroused.
She was nodding her head, in earnest. ‘They say he changed when he was widowed. So that’s at the heart of the matter.’ Head still nodding. ‘He isn’t getting what he needs, you know! Hasn’t done for several years!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Beg’s the word. Begging for it, he is.’
She spun on her thin stiletto heels and the rolls of fat set off a new wave. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing though! Ha, ha!’
The next moment she stormed down the corridor. Her backside juddered with each stomp of her calves.
All of a sudden she came to a halt. Turned round. ‘Au revoir, chéri!’
And rounded the corner.
‘Schwenke rang,’ Gunnarstranda’s voice resounded as he opened the door. A cigarette bobbed up and down in his mouth. Frank slumped on a tatty blue swivel chair and blew out his cheeks.
‘Don’t be so hard on the clerical staff,’ he said.
‘Fatty?’
Gunnarstranda rubbed his nose and dropped the cigarette in a faded red ashtray bearing the scarcely legible word Cinzano in peeling white letters. He chewed his biro and mumbled. ‘She’ll have to learn to knock before trampling down people’s doors!’ And then: ‘Tottenham at home to Leeds?’
‘Away team wins,’ Frank said, switching on the computer.
Gunnarstranda did not agree. ‘Isn’t there a Norwegian between the sticks at Tottenham?’
‘Go for a draw then.’
A few taps on the keyboard. Soon the blue screen came up.
‘Executioner have anything new to say?’
‘Nothing. Apart from what the girl had eaten. And we knew that anyway. Also, he reckoned he could establish death occurring at somewhere between five and eight on Sunday morning. And that was hardly news, either.’
Frank nodded slowly. Thinking to himself that this piece of information was actually very useful. Nevertheless, he knew his boss well enough to realize that the time had no doubt been underlined in thick red ink in the man’s brain.
‘What do you reckon about Sigurd Klavestad?’ Gunnarstranda asked across the desk. ‘Do you think he was telling the truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ Gunnarstranda said, nodding to himself as he continued to fill in the pools coupon.
Frank frowned. ‘Why?’
Gunnarstranda kept writing and counted the crosses.
‘Why?’ Frank repeated, louder.
‘I let him go,’ Gunnarstranda said without looking up. ‘I’ve put Jack Myrberget on his tail for the time being.’
The coupon was finished and he put it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket hanging over the back of the chair. Took another coupon from the pile at the bottom of the drawer. Filled out the squares without any difficulty this time.
‘I’ve used this line of twelve numbers now for twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘Every week for twenty-five years. Do you know how much I’ve earned from it?’
‘No.’
‘Fifty-four kroner. Last Saturday. I got ten right.’
‘Is that all you’ve won in twenty-five years?’
‘With that line, yes. But I know it’ll do the trick one day!’
‘Fifty-two weeks a year. For twenty-five years. Have you ever bothered to work out how much money you’ve wasted?’
‘Whoa there. Just imagine if I win!’
‘Fifty-four kroner!’
Gunnarstranda put back the coupon. ‘What did you find out about Software Partners?’
Frank swung himself round again. ‘Oslo West,’ he summed up. ‘Nice people, every one over forty with varying risk margins. Expensive clothes, expensive place, computer technology. Five employees. I spoke to three of them. The only oddity was that they had put a new lock on their filing cabinet. A beast of a lock. I’m writing a report on it now.’
He snatched a bag from the floor. ‘I was given a whole pile of glossy advertising.’
He lifted the bag of brochures. ‘The outfit’s small but they boast as if they were IBM. Apparently they’re in a period of expansion. I didn’t understand all of it, but they’re going to increase their equity and get more distributors up and down the country.’
Gunnarstranda took some of the material from the bag. ‘I’ve got some bedtime reading then,’ he mumbled.
‘Finance Manager,’ Frank continued from the chair, ‘is someone called Øyvind Bregård, an unmarried bodybuilder. Not very talkative outdoor type who claims he spends his free time hiking in the forests and fields. Admitted, after a lot of fuss, having gone to bed with Reidun, a while back. She gave him the elbow.’